Holocaust Denial: an Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda

Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda Introduction Holocaust denial, which its propagandists misrepresent as "historical revisionism," has become one of the most important vehicles for contemporary anti-Semitism. It is the invention of a collection of long-time anti-Semites and apologists for Hitler. During the fall semester of 1997, Bradley Smith, "director" of the self-styled "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust," (CODOH) launched a new salvo in his continuing propaganda campaign to deny the reality of the Holocaust. He is attempting to place an ad in college newspapers around the country that promises $50,000 to anyone "convincing a national television network to air" a ninety minute video that attempts to show the universally accepted account of Nazi genocide is false. The ad is clearly a ploy. Smith must know his money is safe because no TV network would broadcast such a video. So why does he go to the trouble? The answer can be found at the bottom of the ad. "If you are interested in earning $50,000 . you will find the details of this offer on the World Wide Web" at the CODOH web site. It's the old bait and switch. Smith, who has announced that he is "taking my show to the Internet" is trying to entice college students and others to his web site where he peddles his barely disguised anti-Semitism. For a long time Bradley Smith has tried to present himself as an honest chap, a champion of intellectual freedom simply seeking an "open debate"about the "holocaust controversy [sic]." But this debate is a sham. The so-called holocaust controversy does not exist. It is the invention of a collection of long-time anti-Semites and apologists for Hitler. Holocaust denial, which deniers such as Smith describe as Holocaust "revisionism," has become one of the most important vehicles for contemporary anti-Semitism. The denier strategy is simple and familiar. They distort, even fabricate, history and then broadcast their creations. They have learned from Hitler that "a lie is believed because of the insolent inflexibility with which it is propagated." Smith and his cohorts are engaged in what historian Deborah Lipstadt has termed an "assault on truth and memory." Denial as Anti-Semitism Holocaust denial, which coyly refers to itself as Holocaust revisionism, has emerged after over two decades of propagandizing as an important "cutting edge" ideological cement of the diverse hate movement in the 1990s. While appearing on the surface as a rather arcane pseudo-scholarly challenge to the well-established record of Nazi genocide during the Second World War, Holocaust denial serves as a powerful conspiracy theory uniting otherwise disparate fringe groups (e.g., Liberty Lobby, various Klan factions, neo-Nazis, the Aryan Nations and other Identity groups, racist skinheads, etc.). On the surface, Holocaust deniers portray themselves as individuals and groups engaged in a legitimate, dispassionate quest for historical knowledge and "truth." Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they have adopted the term "revisionism" in order to mask and legitimate their enterprise. After all, the ongoing challenge to and revision of previously accepted historical interpretation is one of the hallmarks of the professional historian's craft. These so-called revisionists have appropriated the name of the post-World War I historical revisionists of the 1920s and 1930s who challenged successfully the previously dominant view of exclusive German guilt for causing the Great War. They assert that the accepted premise that Nazi Germany engaged in a premeditated campaign of systematic genocide against the Jews of Europe during the period of the Second World War is one that does not stand honest scholarly scrutiny. They do not deny that Hitler's government engaged in persecution of and discrimination against Jews in Germany and German controlled countries. They even admit the existence of concentration camps. They assert, however, that the anti-Semitic actions of the Nazi government were in large part a legitimate response to Jewish misdeeds and disloyalty during wartime. As such, the measures taken and the use of concentration camps was not qualitatively different from similar wartime and post-war actions of the western allies and the Soviet Union. Only Germany is singled out for special condemnation, they argue, because it lost the war. What they deny is the existence of any German plan or program to subject the Jews of Europe to genocide. Holocaust deniers seek to plant seeds of questioning and doubt about the Holocaust in their mass audiences. While Holocaust denial has become an article of faith among the militants and followers of the contemporary hate movement, its success does not depend upon conversion to that faith among the general public. The spread of skepticism about the scope and historicity of the Holocaust among a critical mass of public opinion would be considered to be a significant ideological triumph in and of itself. Holocaust denial has been widely embraced within the otherwise disparate contemporary hate movement because it serves as an ideological cement that meets a very contemporary political need. In particular, it provides a sanitized envelope for latter-day would-be Hitlers by seeking to show that the heinous crimes ascribed to the original never took place. As such, much of the barrier preventing politicians and movements of the ultra right from making a strategic breakthrough by appealing to a more mainstream audience would be removed. Accordingly, Holocaust denial provides contemporary legitimation through posthumous rehabilitation. It is no accident that David Duke is an avid propagator of Holocaust denial ideology and materials. William Pierce and other neo-Nazis who once embraced the reality of the Holocaust as the essence of the National Socialist mission (only bemoaning the fact that it did not fully succeed in eliminating Jews from the face of the earth) now find it politically expedient to promote Holocaust denial. The core message of the Holocaust deniers is even more insidious. They recognize the fact that most people believe that the Holocaust actually occurred. How can it be, they ask, that the great majority have come to accept as truth an historical assertion which is in actuality a gigantic falsehood? They answer that most people have come to accept uncritically the story of the Holocaust because they have been systematically propagandized with deliberate lies for over fifty years. These lies include materials inserted into the educational curriculum at all levels of instruction; the content of Holocaust-related dramatic and documentary theatrical film and television programming; a vast Holocaust literature; public rituals of Holocaust remembrance; and, most of all, a federally supported museum built in the shadow of the Washington Monument in the nation's capital. They picture a vast shadowy conspiracy that controls and manipulates the institutions of education, culture, the media and government in order to disseminate a pernicious mythology. The purpose of this Holocaust mythology, they assert, is the inculcation of a sense of guilt in the white,Western Christian world. Those who can make others feel guilty have power over them and can make them do their bidding. This power is used to advance an international Jewish agenda centered in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel. Deniers argue that the manufactured guilt and shame over a mythological Holocaust led to Western, specifically United States, support for the establishment and sustenance of the Israeli state — a sustenance that costs the American taxpayer over three billion dollars per year. They assert that American taxpayers have been and continue to be swindled as well as misled and imagine that by showing the American and other Western peoples how and why they have been victimized can the power of this conspiracy be broken. Once they have been shown the "truth," that there was never any legitimate basis for their feeling of guilt, deniers postulate that these good people will rise up in righteous anger and treat the Holocaust myth conspirators in an appropriate manner. Holocaust denial is a contemporary form of the classic anti-Semitic doctrine of the evil, manipulative and threatening world Jewish conspiracy. It was this doctrine that was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Holocaust. What is on the surface a denial of the reality of genocide is, at its core, an appeal to genocidal hatred. Origins of Denial The roots of Holocaust denial can be found in the bureaucratic language of Nazi policy itself, which sought to camouflage the genocidal intent of what the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," even as these directives were being carried out. After the war, former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers dismissed the overwhelming proof of the Holocaust established at the Nuremberg war crimes trials; similarly, an obscure group of post-War French Trotskyists and anarchists led by Paul Rassinier (since deceased), seeking to advance their own political agenda, denounced evidence of the genocide as "Stalinist atrocity propaganda." However, as an organized propaganda movement, Holocaust "revisionism" took root in 1979 when Willis Carto, founder of Liberty Lobby -- the largest anti-Jewish propaganda organization in the United States -- incorporated the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). The IHR is a pseudo-academic enterprise in which professors with no credentials in history (for example, the late Revilo P. Oliver was a retired University of Illinois Classics teacher; Robert Faurisson earned a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Lyon; Arthur Butz is an engineer at Northwestern University), writers without formal academic certification (such as David Irving, Henri Roques and Bradley Smith) and career anti-Semites (such as Mark Weber, Ernst Zündel and the late David McCalden) convene to develop new outlets for their anti-Jewish , anti-Israel and, for some, pro-Nazi beliefs.

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